There are moments when it appears George Bush does not loathe the campaign trail. But they are only moments.
On his first swing through New Hampshire last month, for example, he alternately charmed and impressed a crowd of 250 invited Republicans at a town meeting in Exeter.
Bush seemed at ease there, answering questions with a hand-in-the-suit-jack et slouch, every inch the Brahmin who should be president.
A few hours later, he was in full Bushian self-parody, yelling about
”carping liberals,” whining about his critics and telling befuddled office workers in Dover, ”Don`t cry for me, Argentina.”
And all that was before Republican flame-thrower Pat Buchanan exposed the emptiness of the Bush re-election effort in last Tuesday`s New Hampshire primary.
When you watch Bush go to the voters, you get a sense of how difficult this last campaign is going to be for him.
After his first term, after his victory in Operation Desert Storm, he doesn`t think he should have to stump for votes among Republicans.
Worse for a president not enthusiastic about having to defend himself, Bush is being defined by his rival. The Bush campaign team may not have figured it out yet, but Buchanan is transforming the president into an electoral victim, into a Republican Michael Dukakis.
In New Hampshire, according to Buchanan, Bush lied about no new taxes, then cut a cynical, inside-the-Beltway deal with the Democrats.
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Bush is ”the greatest taxer and the greatest spender in American history,” screamed the Buchanan ads, as New Hampshire voters absorbed hundreds of repetitions of the 1988 Bush screeching, ”Read my lips . . . no new taxes.”
Down South, Buchanan will abandon his pretense of caring about the economy and instead force Bush to defend ”reverse discrimination” and the
”quota” bill.
That`s the civil rights legislation that the president signed after squadrons of Republican lawyers had leeched the alleged quotas out of it.
No matter. It will be a quota bill when Buchanan gets through with it.
Buchanan revealed a measure of his Southern strategy at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference last Thursday, where the new right-wing darling railed against affirmative action and minority set-aside contracts.
”It is the sons and daughters of middle America who pay the price of reverse discrimination advanced by the Walker`s Point GOP to salve their social consciences at other people`s expense,” Buchanan said, referring to the site of the Bush family compound in Maine.
Buchanan also lashed out at government funding of ”obscene” art by the National Endowment for the Arts, seeking to link Bush and controversial forms of expression.
And there`s more coming, on the anti-business aspects of the Clean Air Act, on presidential complicity in the federal pay raise (Vice President Dan Quayle got one too), on foreign aid (Buchanan is against it), and on school prayer and abortion and the entire litany of right-wing wishes.
Chances are that Bush will be able to muster enough incumbent powers to hold off the Buchanan challenge and persuade his own party to renominate him. But it is a measure of Bush`s failure as a politician and a leader that he has been humiliated by a hyperactive TV talk-show host.
Buchanan, for all his impassioned beliefs and rhetorical skills, is a preposterous candidate for the White House.
Beyond a simple-minded fascination with tax cuts, he possesses not a single idea or program for dealing with the daunting array of problems confronting America, problems the voters see with far more clarity than either Republican in the race.
If Buchanan is not a bigot, it must be said that his candidacy lures a genuinely unsavory element to the process. His staff is made up of
enthusiastic young conservatives, but his supporters in the streets of New Hampshire were, by and large, louts.
They are the standard-brand white guys who burn up the phone lines to talk-radio programs, venting their savage resentments against the poor, the disadvantaged and the unfamiliar.
Buchanan is their man, despite his utter lack of training or preparation to be a presidential contender. And it all must seem grossly unfair to Bush, were it not for the fact that he is being tarred by the same brush that he used with such glee on the hapless Dukakis, as well as fellow Republicans such as Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, four years ago.